26 Nov 08

Music lecturer Dr Berta Joncus who has launched an electronic project to chart British ballad operas for the first time

A member of Oxford University’s music faculty is today (26 November 2008) launching a new pilot electronic project to chart British ballad operas and their music for the first time.

Ballad opera thrust Handel’s music into the public sphere for the first time and is arguably the earliest prototype of today’s popular music industry. It transformed European stage song, merging high with low-style airs, marketing singers and promoting a natural vocal producation.

The unprecedented success of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) precipitated a wave of rival productions, and ballad operas quickly became a staple London stage entertainment. This catalogue captures for the first time, data essential to ballad opera, and provides some audio samples of the repertory.

Through her research, Dr Berta Joncus, Director of Studies in Music at St Anne’s College and St Hilda’s College, has discovered the total number of ballad operas is about 30 per cent greater than previously estimated and total number of songs is now more than 100 per cent greater than thought.

Dr Joncus said: ‘Few realise that the artistic, social and economic relationships of today's pop music industry are rooted in 18th-century London. The Beggar’s Opera revolutionized London’s vocal music market. The craze for its songs and its lead soprano Lavinia Fenton swept through lower and higher orders alike.

‘Within nine years, The Beggar’s Opera had generated enough capital to found Covent Garden, and spawned two hundred ballad operas containing over 7,000 tunes. Of the tunes for which we can identify the composer, those by Handel appeared most frequently in ballad operas. Until around 1740, as it turns out, ballad opera was the primary medium though which Handel's compositions became known.’

The catalogue records not only the titles of British ballad operas and their airs, but also tracks the composers, singer-actors, playwrights and booksellers who contributed to this repertory. Users can also listen to samples of the music. The information recorded provides a wealth of evidence about eighteenth-century music, theatre, dance, politics, print culture and women’s issues.

Dr Joncus also discovered that today’s British ‘folk tunes’ reached their first broad circulation in ballad operas. The ‘common tunes’ were also a means for singer-actors to achieve stardom.

She said: 'I am excited that this project, which I have planned for some years, has been realised to the extent that it has. I warmly welcome those interested in 18th-century studies – whether of music, theatre, dance, literature, politics, art or feminist history – to use this resource. '

Through the pilot project, Dr Joncus aims to attract funding for a more comprehensive resource that would give the sources of 'common tunes', capture the many musical numbers not listed as 'airs', create audio files of top tunes, and trace each ballad opera's performance and publishing history.